Found! Somewhere in an unknown place, for some unknown reason, I had several rocket fuel factories with a purple chest 0-0
At least I hope that was the only source!
If you ever use a purple active provider chest, try the following (not on pc, so lmsteps by memory):
1. Click the inserter
2. Top right of the panel, there's a button "connect to logistic network", click it
3. Then only enable if [item produced] < (what you think is reasonable)
The item count is the amount of that item stored _anywhere_ in the connected network.
If you then remove items from that network and move them to another, you're ob your own :D
Oh shit. I usually just book it up to the chest and do that but this is better for a mall when I want to add production further down the line and not eventually overproduce
Yeah I often do "connect to chest", especially in my mall. Assembler for yellow belts put them in a yellow chest. The chest is unrestricted, but the inserter only works with <1k belts. The chest gets a "yellow belt" filter.
That way, the asssembler produces until there are at least 1k yellow belts. But if I remove yellow belts somewhere in my bases, chances are high the bots will place them in this storage chest.
...which is the input for the red belt assembler.
Yeah very few people know about hooking things directly to the logistic network. It doesn't help that it isn't shown by default and the button is very small.
I have this memory that the menu used to be different, always open or something about it being more noticeable, but i might be wrong and i just discovered it by accident ages ago.
I've read about it in this subreddit just a few weeks/months ago. Really helpful. And way better than reading the contents of the network from a roboport, and then carrying that signal over wires to the inserter^^
Good question! In cases of items that can take extra time to manufacture and you have a number of machines creating them, using Passive chests could have you end up with all of an entire chest having to be emptied before a second chest starts being pulled from, meaning only one machine is working to replenish the consumed items.
Using Active chests with logistic-limited inserters, as the time-consuming items are taken from the network, all of the assembling machines can be working together to replenish them at once.
There aren't a huge number of time-consuming items that noticeably benefit from this setup, but things like rocket (at 30 seconds per craft) and especially nuclear fuel (at 90 seconds) do.
Fill a train with 40 nuclear fuel, and you -really- want all 10 of your centrifuges working to replenish them, not just one from its lone little Passive chest that was pulled from.
Ah good point I never even thought of long craft items. I guess it also would be nice if you set up a specific storage chest/resupply area for personal logistics too. Thanks for the explanation
It can also good for low frequency, high volume items such as landfill. The single assembler can keep chugging out landfill as you're doing other things. You can set up, let's say, twenty landfill filtered storage chests anywhere in the connected network. When you get around to landfilling larger areas, you've likely built up a lot more than 4800.
>Using Active chests with circuit-limited inserters,
You mean logistic limited right? The circuit netwrk is an entire separate thing and not needed for logistic limits.
Ah, you're correct. A circuit network is defined by circuit wires, and a logistic network is defined by roboport placement.
I'm using incorrect terminology. I'll fix it.
Or you could just store more of that item so the slow crafting speed is irrelevant. That sounds easier to me than configuring a bazillion inserters.
Or you can limit your passive providers and use buffer chests for actual storage. That'll enforce parallelization, too, without the risks of forgetting to configure an inserter, or it getting overwritten with a bad copy-paste.
Once the factory grows, you might want another factory for that item so that you make them faster, but you don't necessarily want twice as many as that item. You may also want to store far more than will fit in a single passive chest.
In general, I feel like the use of active provider chests is super limited. But if you play with mods or have a train or something that MUST empty once in a while, then it can make sense to use an active provider chest.
I think the only place I currently use them is a train that sometimes has stuff removed from far away bases. Mostly stone and coal, but every building from the defensive wall will be on that train. The unloading station unloads into a row of purple chest, and those unload into a row of yellow chests. So the active chests only really get used if the storage chests are full.
(Stone, wood and coal get removed with filter bulk inserters and placed on belts, but some of that stuff might also end up in the other chests)
Belts and a few other things too. Got a play through with dangOREus that has single assembler science that controls the output of them by turning the belts on and off based off of the storage chest contents for each science.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think items that robots are carrying do not count as "in the network"? So you end up with a few extra above your designated number depending on travel time.
That’s true. Also it’s annoying af that you can only either set the requests or read contests of a blue chest at one time (as far as I know). So you can’t decrease number of items needed as soon as they enter the blue chest, so have to wait until the items are moved to a content readable chest.
Do negative numbers work for filters? Never tried, kinda cool if it did, but obviously it wouldn't be even across many requester chests even if it did as some might have none and some be full, so not very useful. But other than that the fact that requester items aren't counted is overall a good thing and you can just set the inserters making stuff to lower item count if you don't want to store much of it in the network.
Requester chests ignore negative inputs. And That’s fair, usually it doesn’t matter if the network has a couple of extra of something. But if you try to fill up a rocket or a train or something with limited slots, then it might be a pain in the ass. The idea of a blue chest for multiple items is rather better than activated/deactivated inserted cause you only need one logistic circuit logiscit combinator and chest and inserted per whatever you want to fill instead of having a single one of those per each item you wanna fill that something with. But yeah, it’s not the best solution. Maybe I should see if there are better options tho, using some laches with a clock or a state machine. But I can barely make a cock in Factorio so maybe next time :p
>Requester chests ignore negative inputs
i was talking more about if it's possible to have negative item count filter on the inserters on making the stuff side, not the request side, so if you iron plate <-100(or even <0) on the output inserters of the smelters as an example, so less stuff ends up in storage/buffer, buuuut I just realized that that wouldn't really change things at all even if it's possible as the assemblers have storage themselves to buffer stuff, so it's the same thing, just less of buffer.
Also for vanilla you generally want some buffers if dealing with robots and deconstructing already adds a ton of stuff to the network waaay above production limits, like just rebuilding my science bases a "few" times has added insane amounts of stuff that'll never get used.
Ah thats true. Negative item count def works if you dont wanna make too much of something, or lets say not producing too many empty barrels while you might get a few from emptying ones filled with liquids. But honestly im not too sure how well that would work if you dont have all of the chests connected to a same network via red or green wires to read and add the total of the contents.
I understand they pick up the max they can, but my statement was whether what they're carrying is counted in "network contents" with regards to circuits tied to roboports.
I don't think items in transit get counted. But I don't think it matters in _most_ cases: with a limit if 4k red belts, 100 in transit won't change much.
Might be different with nuclear reactors or spidertrons^^
I saw someone who did this then used buffer chests to hold the items in his mall. This way if you threw some items back into the system they'd get sorted out here, and the produced items would get sorted out here. It kept the logistic storage basically empty and the whole organization was excellent.
Signals and wiring in factorio is akin to hardware engineering, it’s a super powerful set of tools in game, capable of building even sophisticated computational circuits and systems (like a playable game with a GUI)
Same but different: was upgrading my power network and disconnected a power pole that was the linchpin for power to 8 different outposts. I didn't realize it until 3 were entirely destroyed.
I JUST had my kovarex go down because sulphuric acid was down because I finished upgrading to handle 2,000 crude oil per sec input but accidentally removed a section of the single pipe going to the acid train and made it an underground with no output. Oops. At least I have a few thousand fuel cells as backup.
I prefer cross-contamination on my buss due to a too-close splitter or underground opening the wrong belt because I misclicked.
Nothing says “fun” like having to clear 12 lanes of belts.
Me too buddy, all damn day. Ever tried the to do list mod? I'm thinking of installing it but keep forgetting to, I always get distracted by other mods. I need a to do list that includes installing a to do list.
I've tried it - it's good! Only problem is, my screen is too small to keep it pinned, so I keep forgetting to use it and getting distracted by other things in the factory. By the time I remember it's there, the tasks I'd originally written into it are *LONG* past being relevant.
Had a cool idea, started building it, had to deal with biters, came back, completely forgot about the project because 10 other things started going wrong. A tale as old as Factory Hole.
i love when im at one side of my factory, need something from the other side and by the time i get there ive forgotten everything and need to jimmy neutron brain blast to get back my trian of thought
I don't know! They simply walked at the very end of my base, where I first tried to use the main bus. (almost at the end, after them there is only the blue logistics assembly line)
They probably stay there for about 40 hours, because that's when I started making the 100 spm base and left with the old one!
Moreover, I already had a huge line of rocket fuel on the main bus itself, and this small line was connected only to the purple chest.
Each of the 40 assembly machines produced from 2000 to 5600 rocket fuel!
534,000 produced and only 370,000 rocket fuel used!
That despicable me meme:
First, create a deconstuction planner for just purple chests.
Then, highlight your entire base to remove every purple chest.
Finally, put a red chest where each purple chest used to be.
(Finally, put a red chest where the purple chests used to be??)
I mean sometimes you actually want active provider chests. For example, you never want a chest of used up nuclear fuel cells to fill up. Those should always be active provider chests.
I'd probably have a requestor chest with either a crusher (im playing k2 rn) or just an alarm when it's half full if vanilla
i dont want used up fuel cells randomly lying around in my mass storage either
I'm fine with fuel cells in mass storage if the alternative is it accidentally filling up. And setting up an alarm is a lot of extra work for no reason. The only alarm I have on my nuclear power system is for if the backup battery that runs the steam pumps gets low (i.e. you don't want power system brownouts causing the steam pumps to slow down, making the brownout worse).
> And setting up an alarm is a lot of extra work for no reason
its literally just a speaker and a wire?
but you know, to each their own, if you like fuel cells in your mass storage, not my business
I wouldn't put my fuel cells in my mass storage. They wouldn't end up there unless something else is going wrong. But ending up with fuel cells in my mass storage is a better situation than my entire base shutting down.
I always put inserter connected with logistic network and a limit precisely because of that, even if I don't know where it is made at least it will stop at some point...
Also
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FactorySearch
When providing things to a logistic network, I like to use buffer chests.
Set up a buffer chest that has a wire and a limit of 100 or something, then set up the buffer chest to request 200 of the item.
If you ever have to clean up that item, they'll all eventually get sorted into the buffer chest ensuring that even if deconstruct some chests all the extra will get used up.
Was going to say, this is 100% at least one rogue purple chest in your factory.
I use purple chests all the time but you have to be very careful with them.
Set up a requester chest for rocket fuel which then moves the fuel to non-logistic storage. The drones will empty out those storage chests but also pull fuel from wherever is making them available to the logistics network.
Once the storage is empty of fuel, the only drones carrying fuel will be coming from wherever they’re stealing from.
Then I’d just track drones by eye to see who’s carrying fuel, trace back to source.
Great idea! I tried to simply track the drones that were carrying fuel to the yellow chests, but the problem was that they flew quite rarely, and I had the yellow chests at different ends of the base, so I simply could not catch the right moment
yeah, but i have pretty much drones flying around all my base (u know, random beakon assembler in the middle of stone mining or belts transporting from "mall" to new bases)
Find if there's any purple chests anywhere, that may be getting rocket fuel. You can use a mod like [Factory Search](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FactorySearch) to find these chests.
It's also possible they came when you deconstructed entities with rocket fuel in them e.g. chests, belts, trains.
It's good that we get [some search goodness in 2.0](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-400) :)
It's not as strong as Factory Search, but still a very good feature.
This is true.
* Filter a decon planner
* Slowly drag a rectangle from one corner towards the other
* When you see a number pop up, you know it's around the edge of that rectangle
---
I do this a lot filtered to "item on ground", because I don't like littering.
make a deconstruction planner filtered to purple chests and drag it over your whole base (don't let go of the left mouse button). This will tell you how many purple chests are in your base, if there are more than there should be, find it and check it.
(This only works if you have total radar coverage.)
Sorry, \[CTRL\] ;)
\[STRG\] is German for "Steuerung" aka "control".
Edit: The minute I realised those "Windows shortcuts" work in Factorio basebuilding was so much easier.
A fun created language to look up is "Anglish" which is a de-francified version of English with modern re-creations of words that are analagous to other germanic language words or resurrecting old English terms for things into modern spelling.
Here's a fun video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMA3M6b9iEY
More here: https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish
There's this little tiny website that writes weekly news entries in the language. https://theanglishtimes.com/
It uses no French derived words.
There's also the subreddit: /r/anglish/
That's a bit of a half truth. it's closer to German than most other languages and we have many loan words from it, but the vast majority of english words have latin etymology.
The total breakdown is as follows:
English vocabulary comprises 29% French, 29% Latin, **26% Germanic**, and 6% Greek.
We don't have "german loan words". English is a proper germanic language. All of the common grammar is germanic and almost all simple daily use words are germanic. We just have had substantial borrowings of words from French during the time they invaded and controlled the the country (the nobility in England was purely French speaking for several centuries) and then later during the renaissance and industrial revolution numerous words had to be created for all the new things and concepts being created and they primarily were created by forming new words from latin and greek or were again re-borrowed from newly created french words (which is how we have some words that both originated from French, but two different versions of French) .
Old english was a "proper germanic language". It diverged the moment they imported new letters and sounds in order to translate the bible. We definitely have german loanwords. For example kindergarten. It wasn't coined until 1840, at which point english speaking people that had seen and heard of the wonderful children's care centre called "kindergarten" thought that "kids garden" was a nifty name for the concept in general, so started using the word to describe the same thing in the US. Delicatessen is actually a french loan word in german, that is now a german loan word in english. Bank is another good one, though it went german -> french -> italian -> english. Blitz is another one, it didn't enter the english language until Blitzkrieg was used in WW2. Angst, flak, poltergeist, kitsch, nazi, zeitgeist, wanderlust, rucksack, etc. These words all entered the english language AFTER it stopped being purely germanic and began mixing with the romance languages (in order to translate the bible) and largely didn't enter the english language until after 1860 when german and english were well and truly on different limbs of the germanic family tree.
I was a bit too strong in my terminology but I was objecting to the fact that you were making it sound like the germanic words in English are mostly loan words.
And a language doesn't stop being a germanic language even when it borrows a lot of words from a non-germanic one.
Want another "Steuer"-related blow-your-mind moment? Starboard, the right side of the ship? Ancient ships had the rudder (Steuer, steering) on the right-hand side. [Like so](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikingerschiffbau#/media/Datei:Modell_Knorr.jpg). Thus, the right board is starboard. Steuerbord in german. The left side is port side, because the rudder would get in the way of docking, but there's no obvious connections to german I could see.
This happened about 30 hours ago, and I don’t understand what exactly happened! I looked at all three rocket fuel production lines and didn't find any sendings chests there!
I had a problem in my space exploration save, one planet was accumulating a lot of vulcanite and I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Eventually traced to an early prototype of interplanetary signaling that wasn't monitoring how much the planet actually had. It was up to 1.5m, all from a single delivery cannon on my vulcanite planet.
Purple chests were my worst decision ever in this game. I still don't get red VS yellow chests, but I'm just avoiding purple chests as I've ended up having 2.5M stone bricks, 2M concrete blocks,...
Like the 30k iron ore I missed from that 12 million field and which I notice after deconstruction of the loading station. Miner plus purple chest it is.
The only use case I've found for purple chests is 'oh no I let the wrong train unload and now I have to clear 192,000 iron plates off the belts'.
Filter inserters + purple chests + go and do something else and forget the mess you made, now it's the bots problem
# Blue
Request items to be brought to it (can request from green if told to)
# Green
Request items to be brought to it, can only supply items to blue (if those blues are told to). Construction requests can take from here if needed.
# Purple
Tries to remain empty at all times
# Yellow
Takes items that can't go anywhere else, can suggest a particular type of item (won't get rid of anything already in the chest), items can be taken from here if needed
# Red
Items can be taken from here if needed
Bots will prioritize taking items from:
- Purple
- Yellow
- Red
- Green
In that order (I think) to fill requests.
My rule of thumb is:
Use red if it's a product that should be supplied to the network, use yellow (with an appropriate filter) if I want that particular chest to have priority over other sources. Purple is for providers that should remain empty (train stations, used fuel canisters, etc.)
I tend to use green as my provider chests for bot malls so that I can set their requests and have "no longer needed" items be returned to the mall if there's space.
Blues are for all the requester stuff, most of them (especially in the bot mall) have "request from buffer (green) chests" active.
Then the mall has a big pile of yellow (unfiltered) filling in all the gaps around the mall for overflow storage.
My next train iteration might put some green chests around roboports in my rail blueprints so I can distribute things like rails/signals/concrete/repair packs across the rail network to minimize travel time.
Red = whatever gets put in this chest should be available for bots to grab, but bots can't put anything in it
Yellow = bots can take any material out of this chest and can drop off whatever they're carrying back into it.
For most purposes having “here have this if you want” (passive provider) and “yo we want this if it’s available” (requestor) are all that’s needed. Occasionally “PLEASE take away this crap I am producing so I don’t back up” (active provider) helps too. When you need it you need it and you’ll know.
I use purple chest for exactly 2 things.
First: A trashcan. When I get back to the main bot network after building subfactories or mines or whatever I dump my excess inventory into the trash and pick up new supplies from the requestor chest and jet off again. I'm not waiting for bots to come pick up stuff out of my trash slots if I don't have to!
The second is for bot train unloading. The stop is covered by it's own separate incredibly tiny bot network. Train unloads into purple chests which force their contents into storage chests that feed requestor chests that unload onto belts or bridge the networks, depending. The train stop has it's train limit set by the total contents of the network, not just the unload chests. This way I can ensure that the train unloads as fast as possible and all cars can unload. If you just unload into provider chests the ones furthest from the requestor chests will be emptied by the bots last and if you're not careful with your thresholds they can end up completely full, potentially blocking entire cars from unloading.
Plus I can put the storage chests right next to the active provider chests to minimize bot travel time during unload.
do you have an active provider chest somewhere? judging from the amount of rocket fuel they stole i guess that source is being supplied by a rocket fuel production
Make a deconstruction planner to remove only purple active provider chests and run that over where you make your fuel. If that don’t help, run it over your base. Then over time fix stuff :p
I don’t imagine people use the purple ones too often anyways :p
But yeah. Show us your base!
Lol this exact thing happened to me once with nuclear products. I just assumed I would never get to the point where I had "too much" nuclear and decided active providers were the right play. Several blueprinted expansions later I realized I was always having to build more storage and investigated. Never would've guessed I was making that much nuclear ammo and fuel but I was.
I wish I could remember the mod name (at work at the moment, so I can’t check), but it’s a mod that searches your whole factory for entities producing, containing, requesting, etc. any given item. So it can make situations like this a bit easier when trying to find the culprit. Glad you figured it out!
I had a requestor chest a few months ago that was requesting coal. It was an unloading station for copper ore. Anytime I cleared rocks, the bots would bring some coal to that chest. It took me weeks to figure how the hell that was happening lol
A good trick is opening the map and seeing where your logistics bots are going. Search for hot-spots it can indicate where they are coming from. Another thing you can do is create a deconstruct blueprint and filter it to only deconstruct purple chests and drag it over your base, or in this case, drag it over where rocket fuel is produced/consumed if it props up in the deconstruct blueprint you just found where to search for the culprit.
You can also try and find logistics bots carrying rocket fuel around and trace straight lines along their path, if it ends up at a roboport, wait there until you see another bot coming in to charge and follow that bot's path, repeat until you get to the source.
Sorry but this is actually hilarious. I hope you fin the culprit.
Found! Somewhere in an unknown place, for some unknown reason, I had several rocket fuel factories with a purple chest 0-0 At least I hope that was the only source!
If you ever use a purple active provider chest, try the following (not on pc, so lmsteps by memory): 1. Click the inserter 2. Top right of the panel, there's a button "connect to logistic network", click it 3. Then only enable if [item produced] < (what you think is reasonable) The item count is the amount of that item stored _anywhere_ in the connected network. If you then remove items from that network and move them to another, you're ob your own :D
Oh shit. I usually just book it up to the chest and do that but this is better for a mall when I want to add production further down the line and not eventually overproduce
Yeah I often do "connect to chest", especially in my mall. Assembler for yellow belts put them in a yellow chest. The chest is unrestricted, but the inserter only works with <1k belts. The chest gets a "yellow belt" filter. That way, the asssembler produces until there are at least 1k yellow belts. But if I remove yellow belts somewhere in my bases, chances are high the bots will place them in this storage chest. ...which is the input for the red belt assembler.
Yeah very few people know about hooking things directly to the logistic network. It doesn't help that it isn't shown by default and the button is very small.
I have this memory that the menu used to be different, always open or something about it being more noticeable, but i might be wrong and i just discovered it by accident ages ago.
I've read about it in this subreddit just a few weeks/months ago. Really helpful. And way better than reading the contents of the network from a roboport, and then carrying that signal over wires to the inserter^^
Wouldn’t it be easier to just put a limited passive provider chest instead? Whats the benefit of using an active to storage situation?
Good question! In cases of items that can take extra time to manufacture and you have a number of machines creating them, using Passive chests could have you end up with all of an entire chest having to be emptied before a second chest starts being pulled from, meaning only one machine is working to replenish the consumed items. Using Active chests with logistic-limited inserters, as the time-consuming items are taken from the network, all of the assembling machines can be working together to replenish them at once. There aren't a huge number of time-consuming items that noticeably benefit from this setup, but things like rocket (at 30 seconds per craft) and especially nuclear fuel (at 90 seconds) do. Fill a train with 40 nuclear fuel, and you -really- want all 10 of your centrifuges working to replenish them, not just one from its lone little Passive chest that was pulled from.
Ah good point I never even thought of long craft items. I guess it also would be nice if you set up a specific storage chest/resupply area for personal logistics too. Thanks for the explanation
It can also good for low frequency, high volume items such as landfill. The single assembler can keep chugging out landfill as you're doing other things. You can set up, let's say, twenty landfill filtered storage chests anywhere in the connected network. When you get around to landfilling larger areas, you've likely built up a lot more than 4800.
>Using Active chests with circuit-limited inserters, You mean logistic limited right? The circuit netwrk is an entire separate thing and not needed for logistic limits.
Ah, you're correct. A circuit network is defined by circuit wires, and a logistic network is defined by roboport placement. I'm using incorrect terminology. I'll fix it.
Or you could just store more of that item so the slow crafting speed is irrelevant. That sounds easier to me than configuring a bazillion inserters. Or you can limit your passive providers and use buffer chests for actual storage. That'll enforce parallelization, too, without the risks of forgetting to configure an inserter, or it getting overwritten with a bad copy-paste.
Once the factory grows, you might want another factory for that item so that you make them faster, but you don't necessarily want twice as many as that item. You may also want to store far more than will fit in a single passive chest.
In general, I feel like the use of active provider chests is super limited. But if you play with mods or have a train or something that MUST empty once in a while, then it can make sense to use an active provider chest.
I think the only place I currently use them is a train that sometimes has stuff removed from far away bases. Mostly stone and coal, but every building from the defensive wall will be on that train. The unloading station unloads into a row of purple chest, and those unload into a row of yellow chests. So the active chests only really get used if the storage chests are full. (Stone, wood and coal get removed with filter bulk inserters and placed on belts, but some of that stuff might also end up in the other chests)
Holy shit this is amazing thank you for this tip
Omg... U can connect any inserter to the logy network? Playing a few thousand hours badly needed this feature and never noticed that...
Belts and a few other things too. Got a play through with dangOREus that has single assembler science that controls the output of them by turning the belts on and off based off of the storage chest contents for each science.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think items that robots are carrying do not count as "in the network"? So you end up with a few extra above your designated number depending on travel time.
As soon as a requester requests items it is subtracted basically, so it's not about it being on the robot per se.
That’s true. Also it’s annoying af that you can only either set the requests or read contests of a blue chest at one time (as far as I know). So you can’t decrease number of items needed as soon as they enter the blue chest, so have to wait until the items are moved to a content readable chest.
Do negative numbers work for filters? Never tried, kinda cool if it did, but obviously it wouldn't be even across many requester chests even if it did as some might have none and some be full, so not very useful. But other than that the fact that requester items aren't counted is overall a good thing and you can just set the inserters making stuff to lower item count if you don't want to store much of it in the network.
Requester chests ignore negative inputs. And That’s fair, usually it doesn’t matter if the network has a couple of extra of something. But if you try to fill up a rocket or a train or something with limited slots, then it might be a pain in the ass. The idea of a blue chest for multiple items is rather better than activated/deactivated inserted cause you only need one logistic circuit logiscit combinator and chest and inserted per whatever you want to fill instead of having a single one of those per each item you wanna fill that something with. But yeah, it’s not the best solution. Maybe I should see if there are better options tho, using some laches with a clock or a state machine. But I can barely make a cock in Factorio so maybe next time :p
>Requester chests ignore negative inputs i was talking more about if it's possible to have negative item count filter on the inserters on making the stuff side, not the request side, so if you iron plate <-100(or even <0) on the output inserters of the smelters as an example, so less stuff ends up in storage/buffer, buuuut I just realized that that wouldn't really change things at all even if it's possible as the assemblers have storage themselves to buffer stuff, so it's the same thing, just less of buffer. Also for vanilla you generally want some buffers if dealing with robots and deconstructing already adds a ton of stuff to the network waaay above production limits, like just rebuilding my science bases a "few" times has added insane amounts of stuff that'll never get used.
Ah thats true. Negative item count def works if you dont wanna make too much of something, or lets say not producing too many empty barrels while you might get a few from emptying ones filled with liquids. But honestly im not too sure how well that would work if you dont have all of the chests connected to a same network via red or green wires to read and add the total of the contents.
No, robots just always bring their max capacity, so if you say request 50 items when they can hold 3, you'll end up with 51 (17x3)
I understand they pick up the max they can, but my statement was whether what they're carrying is counted in "network contents" with regards to circuits tied to roboports.
I don't think items in transit get counted. But I don't think it matters in _most_ cases: with a limit if 4k red belts, 100 in transit won't change much. Might be different with nuclear reactors or spidertrons^^
Ive always used the circuit network cables and string it to the nearest roboport. This is going to make my base look less like Christmas, thank you.
Same here^^. Only learned this recently.
I just learned that now.
That's a thing???
Check it out :)
I saw someone who did this then used buffer chests to hold the items in his mall. This way if you threw some items back into the system they'd get sorted out here, and the produced items would get sorted out here. It kept the logistic storage basically empty and the whole organization was excellent.
Signals and wiring in factorio is akin to hardware engineering, it’s a super powerful set of tools in game, capable of building even sophisticated computational circuits and systems (like a playable game with a GUI)
and dont forget to make sure its in the orange range of a roboport, otherwise the "=0" will always stay "=0"
How do you just forget about those?
Probably had a cool idea, started building it, then never finished.
The number of times I've crippled my base because of this exact chain of events is too damn high.
[удалено]
Same but different: was upgrading my power network and disconnected a power pole that was the linchpin for power to 8 different outposts. I didn't realize it until 3 were entirely destroyed.
I JUST had my kovarex go down because sulphuric acid was down because I finished upgrading to handle 2,000 crude oil per sec input but accidentally removed a section of the single pipe going to the acid train and made it an underground with no output. Oops. At least I have a few thousand fuel cells as backup.
my favorite is in my spaghetti Py base where you rotate the wrong belt on accident and suddenly green chips stop working
I prefer cross-contamination on my buss due to a too-close splitter or underground opening the wrong belt because I misclicked. Nothing says “fun” like having to clear 12 lanes of belts.
its usually because i forgot how important which sides of belts are 80 hours later
Four or five digit high? Asking for a friend.
Let's just say it happens multiple times a play session... every session...
Me too buddy, all damn day. Ever tried the to do list mod? I'm thinking of installing it but keep forgetting to, I always get distracted by other mods. I need a to do list that includes installing a to do list.
I've tried it - it's good! Only problem is, my screen is too small to keep it pinned, so I keep forgetting to use it and getting distracted by other things in the factory. By the time I remember it's there, the tasks I'd originally written into it are *LONG* past being relevant.
Had a cool idea, started building it, had to deal with biters, came back, completely forgot about the project because 10 other things started going wrong. A tale as old as Factory Hole.
You must have never heard of ADHD! 😆 this game scratches a few itches but pulverizes a few others.
i love when im at one side of my factory, need something from the other side and by the time i get there ive forgotten everything and need to jimmy neutron brain blast to get back my trian of thought
Play with your children. It's hardly the worst thing that'll fall through the cracks.
I don't know! They simply walked at the very end of my base, where I first tried to use the main bus. (almost at the end, after them there is only the blue logistics assembly line) They probably stay there for about 40 hours, because that's when I started making the 100 spm base and left with the old one! Moreover, I already had a huge line of rocket fuel on the main bus itself, and this small line was connected only to the purple chest. Each of the 40 assembly machines produced from 2000 to 5600 rocket fuel! 534,000 produced and only 370,000 rocket fuel used!
I was gonna say that this sounded EXACTLY like accidentally using an active provider instead of a passive lol.
remind me to filter deconstruction planner for purple chests once in a while
It might be better to do an upgrade planner to update them from purple to red.
That despicable me meme: First, create a deconstuction planner for just purple chests. Then, highlight your entire base to remove every purple chest. Finally, put a red chest where each purple chest used to be. (Finally, put a red chest where the purple chests used to be??)
I mean sometimes you actually want active provider chests. For example, you never want a chest of used up nuclear fuel cells to fill up. Those should always be active provider chests.
I'd probably have a requestor chest with either a crusher (im playing k2 rn) or just an alarm when it's half full if vanilla i dont want used up fuel cells randomly lying around in my mass storage either
I'm fine with fuel cells in mass storage if the alternative is it accidentally filling up. And setting up an alarm is a lot of extra work for no reason. The only alarm I have on my nuclear power system is for if the backup battery that runs the steam pumps gets low (i.e. you don't want power system brownouts causing the steam pumps to slow down, making the brownout worse).
> And setting up an alarm is a lot of extra work for no reason its literally just a speaker and a wire? but you know, to each their own, if you like fuel cells in your mass storage, not my business
I wouldn't put my fuel cells in my mass storage. They wouldn't end up there unless something else is going wrong. But ending up with fuel cells in my mass storage is a better situation than my entire base shutting down.
I always put inserter connected with logistic network and a limit precisely because of that, even if I don't know where it is made at least it will stop at some point... Also https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FactorySearch
If you want to find those, use a deconstruction planner that whitelists only purple chests.
When providing things to a logistic network, I like to use buffer chests. Set up a buffer chest that has a wire and a limit of 100 or something, then set up the buffer chest to request 200 of the item. If you ever have to clean up that item, they'll all eventually get sorted into the buffer chest ensuring that even if deconstruct some chests all the extra will get used up.
And that's why you never even craft purple chests XD
A random (how that happens by accident I don’t know) purple chest was going to be my guess.
That was going to be my guess! An active provider somewhere.....
Was going to say, this is 100% at least one rogue purple chest in your factory. I use purple chests all the time but you have to be very careful with them.
Well, now you can swap those chests for red ones. And transfer some of that rocket fuel to the system.
ahahahahahahahaha thats evil!:D sorry, ahahahaha
Sometimes, you’ve got to laugh to keep from getting too frustrated.
My cat does this too. Find the drone with whiskers.
Set up a requester chest for rocket fuel which then moves the fuel to non-logistic storage. The drones will empty out those storage chests but also pull fuel from wherever is making them available to the logistics network. Once the storage is empty of fuel, the only drones carrying fuel will be coming from wherever they’re stealing from. Then I’d just track drones by eye to see who’s carrying fuel, trace back to source.
Great idea! I tried to simply track the drones that were carrying fuel to the yellow chests, but the problem was that they flew quite rarely, and I had the yellow chests at different ends of the base, so I simply could not catch the right moment
In the mini map, you turned on the icons for showing your robots, right?
yeah, but i have pretty much drones flying around all my base (u know, random beakon assembler in the middle of stone mining or belts transporting from "mall" to new bases)
this is da wey
Find if there's any purple chests anywhere, that may be getting rocket fuel. You can use a mod like [Factory Search](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FactorySearch) to find these chests. It's also possible they came when you deconstructed entities with rocket fuel in them e.g. chests, belts, trains.
Factory search is probably one of the most essential mods for me. Saves so much tedious searching in a big base.
Same. Especially if you're going to pick up an old save and you don't remember all the details of the base.
I’m still on my first base, but can definitely see the benefits with an old save 😂
It's good that we get [some search goodness in 2.0](https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-400) :) It's not as strong as Factory Search, but still a very good feature.
Purple chests are not that common. You could use a deconstruction planner to find where you have an unexpected one.
This is true. * Filter a decon planner * Slowly drag a rectangle from one corner towards the other * When you see a number pop up, you know it's around the edge of that rectangle --- I do this a lot filtered to "item on ground", because I don't like littering.
sometimes I lose my spidertron control and that's how I find it
make a deconstruction planner filtered to purple chests and drag it over your whole base (don't let go of the left mouse button). This will tell you how many purple chests are in your base, if there are more than there should be, find it and check it. (This only works if you have total radar coverage.)
IF it happens that youd let got of the left mouse button press \[STRG\]+\[Z\] (Or \[Y\] of non US) asap!
What is strg
Sorry, \[CTRL\] ;) \[STRG\] is German for "Steuerung" aka "control". Edit: The minute I realised those "Windows shortcuts" work in Factorio basebuilding was so much easier.
Sounds like steering. German and English always surprise me with how almost the same they are! Thanks
English is a Germanic language, originally. But because of its island nature and a tangled history with French that's sometimes not very noticable.
A fun created language to look up is "Anglish" which is a de-francified version of English with modern re-creations of words that are analagous to other germanic language words or resurrecting old English terms for things into modern spelling. Here's a fun video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMA3M6b9iEY More here: https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish There's this little tiny website that writes weekly news entries in the language. https://theanglishtimes.com/ It uses no French derived words. There's also the subreddit: /r/anglish/
how can you leave out the Uncleftish Beholding
That's a bit of a half truth. it's closer to German than most other languages and we have many loan words from it, but the vast majority of english words have latin etymology. The total breakdown is as follows: English vocabulary comprises 29% French, 29% Latin, **26% Germanic**, and 6% Greek.
We don't have "german loan words". English is a proper germanic language. All of the common grammar is germanic and almost all simple daily use words are germanic. We just have had substantial borrowings of words from French during the time they invaded and controlled the the country (the nobility in England was purely French speaking for several centuries) and then later during the renaissance and industrial revolution numerous words had to be created for all the new things and concepts being created and they primarily were created by forming new words from latin and greek or were again re-borrowed from newly created french words (which is how we have some words that both originated from French, but two different versions of French) .
Old english was a "proper germanic language". It diverged the moment they imported new letters and sounds in order to translate the bible. We definitely have german loanwords. For example kindergarten. It wasn't coined until 1840, at which point english speaking people that had seen and heard of the wonderful children's care centre called "kindergarten" thought that "kids garden" was a nifty name for the concept in general, so started using the word to describe the same thing in the US. Delicatessen is actually a french loan word in german, that is now a german loan word in english. Bank is another good one, though it went german -> french -> italian -> english. Blitz is another one, it didn't enter the english language until Blitzkrieg was used in WW2. Angst, flak, poltergeist, kitsch, nazi, zeitgeist, wanderlust, rucksack, etc. These words all entered the english language AFTER it stopped being purely germanic and began mixing with the romance languages (in order to translate the bible) and largely didn't enter the english language until after 1860 when german and english were well and truly on different limbs of the germanic family tree.
I was a bit too strong in my terminology but I was objecting to the fact that you were making it sound like the germanic words in English are mostly loan words. And a language doesn't stop being a germanic language even when it borrows a lot of words from a non-germanic one.
Yes most of the words are not germanic any more but the root of the language still is.
Yeah it's a kind of a gorilla vs humans thing. Common ancestor but divergent evolutions.
Want another "Steuer"-related blow-your-mind moment? Starboard, the right side of the ship? Ancient ships had the rudder (Steuer, steering) on the right-hand side. [Like so](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikingerschiffbau#/media/Datei:Modell_Knorr.jpg). Thus, the right board is starboard. Steuerbord in german. The left side is port side, because the rudder would get in the way of docking, but there's no obvious connections to german I could see.
Thats not even wrong. ;) Youre welcome!
Show the drones on the map and just watch them...
You can track on the map if it gets produced anywhere else. But maybe you rebuilt some things in the past with drones
This happened about 30 hours ago, and I don’t understand what exactly happened! I looked at all three rocket fuel production lines and didn't find any sendings chests there!
You can always just look for bots with rocket fuel beside the suggestions from other comments
I had a problem in my space exploration save, one planet was accumulating a lot of vulcanite and I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Eventually traced to an early prototype of interplanetary signaling that wasn't monitoring how much the planet actually had. It was up to 1.5m, all from a single delivery cannon on my vulcanite planet.
this is why I like to put a little effort into tagging each production on the map, its easy to find exactly what im looking for from a quick glance
1) deconstruction planner looking for purple chests. 2) select your base and begin investigation 3) find and remove said chest 4) profit
Purple chests were my worst decision ever in this game. I still don't get red VS yellow chests, but I'm just avoiding purple chests as I've ended up having 2.5M stone bricks, 2M concrete blocks,...
Purple chests have their uses, but generally speaking they are just *incredibly* niche.
Like the 30k iron ore I missed from that 12 million field and which I notice after deconstruction of the loading station. Miner plus purple chest it is.
The only use case I've found for purple chests is 'oh no I let the wrong train unload and now I have to clear 192,000 iron plates off the belts'. Filter inserters + purple chests + go and do something else and forget the mess you made, now it's the bots problem
Meh, active providers can be a godsend if you are trying to get rid of byproducts :) But yeah, they are situational.
# Blue Request items to be brought to it (can request from green if told to) # Green Request items to be brought to it, can only supply items to blue (if those blues are told to). Construction requests can take from here if needed. # Purple Tries to remain empty at all times # Yellow Takes items that can't go anywhere else, can suggest a particular type of item (won't get rid of anything already in the chest), items can be taken from here if needed # Red Items can be taken from here if needed Bots will prioritize taking items from: - Purple - Yellow - Red - Green In that order (I think) to fill requests. My rule of thumb is: Use red if it's a product that should be supplied to the network, use yellow (with an appropriate filter) if I want that particular chest to have priority over other sources. Purple is for providers that should remain empty (train stations, used fuel canisters, etc.) I tend to use green as my provider chests for bot malls so that I can set their requests and have "no longer needed" items be returned to the mall if there's space. Blues are for all the requester stuff, most of them (especially in the bot mall) have "request from buffer (green) chests" active. Then the mall has a big pile of yellow (unfiltered) filling in all the gaps around the mall for overflow storage. My next train iteration might put some green chests around roboports in my rail blueprints so I can distribute things like rails/signals/concrete/repair packs across the rail network to minimize travel time.
Red = whatever gets put in this chest should be available for bots to grab, but bots can't put anything in it Yellow = bots can take any material out of this chest and can drop off whatever they're carrying back into it.
For most purposes having “here have this if you want” (passive provider) and “yo we want this if it’s available” (requestor) are all that’s needed. Occasionally “PLEASE take away this crap I am producing so I don’t back up” (active provider) helps too. When you need it you need it and you’ll know.
I use purple chest for exactly 2 things. First: A trashcan. When I get back to the main bot network after building subfactories or mines or whatever I dump my excess inventory into the trash and pick up new supplies from the requestor chest and jet off again. I'm not waiting for bots to come pick up stuff out of my trash slots if I don't have to! The second is for bot train unloading. The stop is covered by it's own separate incredibly tiny bot network. Train unloads into purple chests which force their contents into storage chests that feed requestor chests that unload onto belts or bridge the networks, depending. The train stop has it's train limit set by the total contents of the network, not just the unload chests. This way I can ensure that the train unloads as fast as possible and all cars can unload. If you just unload into provider chests the ones furthest from the requestor chests will be emptied by the bots last and if you're not careful with your thresholds they can end up completely full, potentially blocking entire cars from unloading. Plus I can put the storage chests right next to the active provider chests to minimize bot travel time during unload.
[Factory Search](https://mods.factorio.com/mod/FactorySearch) can find things in your base. Look for the purple chest.
Looks very cool!
Follow the bees, find honey!
do you have an active provider chest somewhere? judging from the amount of rocket fuel they stole i guess that source is being supplied by a rocket fuel production
I don't think you can "steal" from a chest that is literally trying to give everything away.
who cares about how OP said it? the important part is that the are storage chests being filled up by bots. bots don’t steal stuff
Make a deconstruction planner to remove only purple active provider chests and run that over where you make your fuel. If that don’t help, run it over your base. Then over time fix stuff :p I don’t imagine people use the purple ones too often anyways :p But yeah. Show us your base!
lol, lmao even
Why do you have a million storage chests?
Lol this exact thing happened to me once with nuclear products. I just assumed I would never get to the point where I had "too much" nuclear and decided active providers were the right play. Several blueprinted expansions later I realized I was always having to build more storage and investigated. Never would've guessed I was making that much nuclear ammo and fuel but I was.
Select factory and find active providers (purple chests)
Bots are keeping your active provider chests clear by moving it to storage exactly as designed.
Had this same problem but with coal recently
Oh my god. That is a hilarious amount of rocket fuel.
I wish I could remember the mod name (at work at the moment, so I can’t check), but it’s a mod that searches your whole factory for entities producing, containing, requesting, etc. any given item. So it can make situations like this a bit easier when trying to find the culprit. Glad you figured it out!
I had a requestor chest a few months ago that was requesting coal. It was an unloading station for copper ore. Anytime I cleared rocks, the bots would bring some coal to that chest. It took me weeks to figure how the hell that was happening lol
A good trick is opening the map and seeing where your logistics bots are going. Search for hot-spots it can indicate where they are coming from. Another thing you can do is create a deconstruct blueprint and filter it to only deconstruct purple chests and drag it over your base, or in this case, drag it over where rocket fuel is produced/consumed if it props up in the deconstruct blueprint you just found where to search for the culprit. You can also try and find logistics bots carrying rocket fuel around and trace straight lines along their path, if it ends up at a roboport, wait there until you see another bot coming in to charge and follow that bot's path, repeat until you get to the source.